bringing home the millstones

One of the many amazing things about being here is that we are not only custodians of a mill, but of several millstones, some of which (the mill’s former custodian informed me) were found in nearby fields and were kindly returned to the mill by local farmers after the building’s restoration a few years ago.

As aesthetic objects, I find the millstones in themselves extraordinarily beautiful and appealing. . .

. . . but they are also objects with a history, about which (me being me) I’m now trying to find out more.

I began my reading with the always brilliant Angus Martin’s Kintyre Country Life (1987; 2014), which includes a tantalising anecdote from an unpublished manuscript by Andrew McKerral (author of Kintyre in the Seventeenth Century (1948)) about the bringing of a finished millstone from the quarry at the Brunerican shore (a mile or two away from us) back to this mill.

“After the stone had been finished, the miller got the tenants assembled to fetch it. Through the hole in the middle of the stone, a long pole — or wan [wand] — was inserted to which horses were yoked. The ends of the wan were “held and steered by some of the men” and in that way the stone was “trundled along the shore, across the Conieglen Water, and finally to the main road and the mill.”

McKerral apparently noted that unfinished millstones could still be seen around Brunerican at his time of writing (1945). I have not spotted anything there that looks remotely like a millstone as yet, but Tom intends to get the drone out this weekend to see if aerial images might help us pinpoint the location of the quarry (here’s hoping!)

“Our” mill first appears in the Kintyre record in 1636, and the practice of rolling home locally quarried millstones with local folk, horses and “wans” seems to have been common all over Scotland in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Scottish millstones were quarried in one large, circular piece, and were not only rolled home, but exported, by sea, to England, Ireland and the then colonies in North America. In Kintyre as in other parts of Scotland, the quarrying and production of local millstones probably did not persist much beyond the early decades of the eighteenth century, because at that point (as Enid Gauldie explains in The Scottish Country Miller (1981)), Scotland began importing French millstones instead. French millers had discovered that grains ground against hard chalcedonic hornstone quartz — or burr stone — created meal and flour of exceptional quality and fineness. Burr stone was also incredibly hard and hard wearing (and therefore economical). English and Scottish millers wanted in on the French burr stone action!

Rather than being quarried in one large circle, writes Gauldie “French burr stones were quarried in small pieces which were trimmed to fit together in segments like those of the arch in a building. They were then stuck together with mortar or plaster of paris and an iron hoop was applied by coopers to the edge of the stone.”

French burr stone became so important to British milling, that, as Gauldie writes: “in 1809, the embargo on trade with France had to be lifted for three months to allow their importation. It is surely an indication of their importance to the food supply of the nation that a war should be interrupted to allow them passage.”

“Our” millstones, then, are not seventeenth century originals, quarried in one piece from local conglomerate on the shores of Brunerican, but French burr stones, quarried in pieces, shipped to Scotland, reformed and secured with iron bands by local coopers, and subsequently locally dressed.

The worn grooves of the dressing are still evident on some of the stones.

But two of the stones are not formed from burr stone only. With different stone being used for their outer rings and inner hubs, they are in fact rather interesting composites.

The outer ring of these stones are formed from 8 banded segments of French Burr, while their inner hubs have been quarried from single pieces of local sandstone

From comparing them to other examples illustrated in Geoffrey Hay and Geoffrey Stell’s Monuments of Industry (1986), I’d say the stone above appears to be an oatmeal runner stone and the one below an oatmeal shelling stone.

“The use of a sandstone centre in order to economise in the use of the expensive French burr stone was,” Hay and Stell note, “apparently a distinctive Scottish practice.”

I’ve an awful lot to learn about the mill and its beautiful stones, but what I’ve been able to discover so far has already taught me something about the evolving life of this historic building: adopting new technologies, processes, tools, and stones as it tirelessly transformed grain into food for animals and humans over the course of four centuries. I also now understand a little more about the interconnectedness of a rural economy that extended from the shores of Kintyre to the quarries of La Ferté-sous-Jouarre.

Hope you don’t mind my sharing my millstone investigations. I shall, of course, be sure to tell you if we (and the drone) discern any evidence of millstone quarrying at Brunerican!

References:

Geoffrey Hay and Geoffrey Stell, Monuments of Industry (1986)

Andrew McKerral, Kintyre in the Seventeenth Century (1948)

Angus Martin, Kintyre Country Life (1984)

Enid Gauldie, The Scottish Country Miller (1981)